Headworx

Back in 2008 I touched on the concept of two-way personal navigation systems . Most navigation devices / applications today are still one - way. They receive GPS signals from satellites, and based on that compute the current location, rendering it based on locally stored map data. usually the story ends at this point. Now consider what happens when all these millions GPS receivers can report their whereabouts on-line, real-time, to some servers in the Cloud. And calm down please you who cry "privacy violation" now. It is not about you personally. It is about statistics of the crowds. Just quantitative data. I do not care where exactly or how fast you drive. But knowing where and how fast how many people are moving (or standing still) means a lot. Simply means real time traffic data. Of course we have had such systems for years now. Variants of the TMC ( Traffic Message Channel , based on FM radio broadcast technology) are in service world-wide. But the are neither accurate, n...

Today I would like to attract your attention to the upcoming Emerging Communications 2010 conference. There are not many events I am so honestly positive about, but this one is special. The reason is it gathers many "out of the box" thinkers. It is put together by Lee S Dryburgh, the man I referred to in my post back in 2007 . When I met Lee at that time he was a speaker at another conference. Later on he started putting together the eComm series. I have to say I love his vision. I have been working with MNOs for many years now. Both with big and small ones. And I have to say I am terrified witnessing the lack of innovation they have. The bigger they are, the worse. Yes I know things are different in Asia. But Asia is a different story. At the same time Europe and North America offer just three basic services. Bell - style poor quality point - to - point audio calls, short text messages and dumb data transfer. And it has been like that for the last 15 years. Sounds like it i...

So the iPad can be preordered now. I somehow lost my initial enthusiasm, so my personal feeling is the preorders are not building as fast as expected. But this is just personal. In fact folks may be racing out since the gates opened last week... So why the loss of excitement? Well... honestly my feeling is the device is not 100% perfect. First thinking of buying the iPad at the very first possible moment, I started thinking about it is as of a purely Web tablet. Thus no need for local storage (especially not for the overpriced 64GB of flash). My iPad content will be in the Cloud. Or on my laptop. This is the second point. The iPad will never replace my laptop. It is designed to be a slave accessory. Synced via iTunes to the master. It has no I/O ports, so I will not be using it to collect my digital pictures directly from a camera either. So to carry the iPad with me on the road I would need to carry BOTH my notebook and the iPad, which would be an utterly stupid setup (I try travel li...

Following my recent Mobile World Congress 2010 recap , there is one subject I did not touch, that deserves a separate blog entry. Femtocells. I posted on femtocells back in November 2009 . The post was inspired by the upcoming book by George Gilder, that will be the American version of the original works of Henry Gau. Gau / Gilder vision is, as always, both ultimate and radical , heralding the inevitable failure of LTE and massive simplification of network topology, optimized for just one task: bidirectional video streaming. While Gau Telecosm is by no means the Vision for the perfect world, the reality is, as always, far more complicated. Personally I think we will get there, but the road will be much longer, as technology alone never wins in business environments. But there are clear signals we have already started the transition towards the world filled with femtocells. Strolling along the crowded stands inside the MWC exhibition halls I had absolutely no problem using my broadband ...

Over the years I have tried a number of cellular wireless modems. I remember my first one - the PCMCIA form factor Nokia so called "high speed" data card. It was before mobile networks started offering packet data. Sounds strange today... No packet data? Yes that is true... I made my first GPRS connection probably in 2001. I remember I used the Ericsson T39 to route packets from my laptop over Bluetooth and then over GPRS data connection, using the famous *99# dial string. But before the Ericsson and GPRS there was the Nokia HSCSD card, able to utilize up to four GSM time slots to make it 4*9600=38400 bits per second on a dedicated point - to - point connection. And then GPRS arrived, upgraded later on to EDGE and now to UMTS and its evolution standards. With UMTS I have used a USB - type modem most often. Purists often opt for integrated 3G module in their laptops, but somehow I have always felt USB gives me more freedom. I remember two years ago spending holidays in a very...

The 2010 GSMA MWC show was smaller than it used to be in the previous years. And there were not many surprises either. Shows are no longer calendar marking events for vendors, rather get-together places to meet and discuss. With two exceptions, most of the already present trends continue to evolve. Let me expand the most important ones a little. There seems to be no more money and innovation in voice. People use voice to talk and want to do everything else mobile using the data channel. Yes, Orange + Ericsson were running live HD Voice - a business class service based on wideband AMR-WB codec. But MNOs generally do not want this service. First it consumes more resources on their networks oversubscribed with data packets. And second - their marketing departments have no clue how to sell this service as most of them claim to have the best call quality already... So they are afraid of competitors pointing fingers at them "you see - to have a quality conversation you have to pay more...

A friend of mine pointed me to the recent article at MSNBC about the meh reaction . It is true our reactions to the continuous stream of new products and services crying for our attention is muted. The article points to weak economy as one of the reasons that we are not that much excited about replacing the aging stuff with new toys. In my opinion the reasons are somehow different. It is not money but time and skills we invest most. And putting it simply we expect a good return on our investments. In the continuous paradigm shift every new device or service we have to learn how to use it. And the pace of changes is so fast, we almost never fully learn before a new one comes. And at this point it is no longer funny, as we get tired trying to catch up. There is plethora of examples. The very recent one is the Google Buzz referred to in the before mentioned article. The Buzz was introduced last week and after reading the news I was expecting it to arrive on my Gmail desktop. And just afte...